Category Archives: Terrorism

TSA – Why pat-downs are ridiculous and after 9 years – they still can’t spell R*I*S*K management. Follow the money.

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Every fifteen minutes, the media is full of images of children being patted down at the airports. The media is stirring up the porridge on this story.  But think for a moment – TSA is spending 90% of it’s budget, resources and energy on passengers who are not and will never be a threat.  And that leaves only 10% to spend on legitimate and potentially dangerous travelers.  This raises several questions.

First – why?  When the DHS espouses it’s emphasis on RISK MANAGEMENT – it’s clear that they don’t follow it.  The private company that runs the screening programs makes substantially more money by screening everyone, if they only had to screen real suspects – their income (which is over $8 Billion per year) could be cut in half!

By applying the risk management principles that are in their charter – they would be able to spare the poor traveling public and spend more time and more resources on checking and double-checking the potential terrorists. 

Most rational people can watch an airport scanner line for two hours and realize it is an enormous waste of resources for very little results and testers can routinely smuggle in knives, lighters and whatever else they want.

The inability of TSA to adopt a rational approach to airport screening – and remember – they still don’t’ screen the cargo riding on the same plane – is just lining pockets including the lobbyists who have been pushing the extra-expensive full body scanners.

The justification for this big expenditure is that is avoids the dreaded “profiling”.  We should be profiling – we should be checking people who like to visit Yemen for Easter.  We should be doing intense screening of young men between the ages of 18 and 30 who have recently traveled in or out of Pakistan.

 Here’s a partial list of who we shouldn’t waste time and resources screening:

 Children under 10
Active and Retired Military
Civilian Federal Employees
Civilian Federal Partners
Members of a ‘Preferred Traveler Program’
Individuals who opt for an intensive background check
Senior Citizens over 70

But you know what they say – Money Talks… and it’s talking to me this Thanksgiving week.

BLUES ON THE BORDER – WILL SECURITY FINALLY GET A BREAK?

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Arizona finally did it.  They called DHS’s bluff, and actually DID SOMETHING about the US-Mexican border.  it has nothing to do with racial profiling and nothing to do with discrimination — it has everything to do with America’s security against terrorism.

Everyone who is so shocked, appalled and worried – shouldn’t be.   Everyone wants to prevent the next 911, they want to keep out drug traffickers….. and you cannot get that done with an open border to our south. 

I say it over and over – PLEASE QUOTE ME – you can’t have homeland security with an open border!  You can NEVER have homeland security unless you have security at the border first. This is a key risk assessment vulnerability that anyone doing a formal assessment would spot immediately. 

What good is having a checkpoint on the I-5 interstate in San Ysidro if illegals can avoid the border crossings and run right into the U.S.? 

Look at strictly as a cost issue – looking at the real numbers helps… 

  • Cost of maintaining our phony border controls   $100 Million Dollars for 2010

(from the total ICE (U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement) budget of  $5.7 Billion Dollars). 

  • The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) says that since 2005, 15% of domestic arrests are arrest of illegal aliens!
     
  • Budget for DEA to combat Drug Traffic from Mexico   – over $25 Million Dollars (just to add an additional 128 agents along the southwest border). 
     
  • The Southwest Border Initiative Virtual Fence Project – $800 Million dollars
  •  The Secure Fence Act – over $7 Billion dollars 

AND OUR BORDER is still wide open.    Federal agents trying to police the border do not have the proper support and are discouraging from killing murderous drug dealers and human trafficking mules.   

If you look even farther – take the entire budget of the Department of Homeland Security, which is  $55 Billion dollars.   This money can largely be considered as wasted, if there is no control over our border with Mexico.  

You see it all the time at companies out in rural areas – they have a chain link fence around the back of the property, but the fence has a 14 foot gap in it, and all it does is concentrate the intrusions right through the gap in the fence.  It does not deter crime, it cannot prevent theft – because the fence is not secure, there is an open gap.  

That analogy works with our borders, too.  If you wanted to get into the U.S. illegally, would you choose to drive thru the checkpoint at El Paso?  Through San Ysidro?  Fly in from Mexico City and have to show a passport?   NO – you would breach the border and just walk across someone along the thousands of miles of unsecured border. It is a no-brainer, even for a terrorist.

As a risk assessment expert, I am personally thrilled that Arizona has pushed the envelope and passed a bill that at least attempts to find a solution to our horribly expensive and totally ineffective southwest border controls.  It might galvanize enough people to actually get something done about this open border policy. 

Remember, you cannot have a secure country without securing the borders.

Do Terrorists have Lower IQ’s?

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Is it nature or nurture? Do you think there’s a correlation between the intelligence of a person and their choice of terrorism as a vocation?

I’m not talking here about the brilliant, twisted strategists who create the idea of the revolution. I’m talking about the mules – the new recruits who can’t wait to blow themselves up for the cause. Or shoot and kill innocent people – like the Holocaust Museum incident in 2009.

Take “The Underpants Bomber”, for example. If he REALLY wanted to blow up the plane, why didn’t he go into the bathroom and light himself up there? Why go back to his seat where it is always crowded anyway? Only one conclusion can be reached – he is stupid! He suffers from a serious flaw in his reasoning ability.

One of the most interesting films I have seen recently was done by Fareed Zakaria and which aired on HBO. It is called, “Terror in Mumbai” and Fareed narrates it.
Take the forty-five minutes needed to watch it because it is incredible and goes right to my point about terrorists being dumb.

After the Mumbai bombing attacks started, the government was able to hook up to the actual cell phones being used by the terrorists to communicate with the Big Brain Terror Leader ( also called his Controller, or Handler??) back in Pakistan. So the movie is actually the real conversations between the operatives and their Controller.

At one point, the Controller tells them to set the hotel mattresses on fire. They try but can’t get a fire going, so the Controller screams into the phone – go back and light them again.

The on-the-ground terrorists seem to have no idea of how to kill anyone, and are almost goaded into doing it by the Controller on the phone who has to explain to them what to do next, and who you hear him screaming into the phone, “Shoot him in the head”.

They seem almost like puppets and, as you watch the movie, you realize that these guys couldn’t terrorize anyone on their own. They are uneducated, unsophisticated young men who probably would have gone sightseeing if the Controller hadn’t kept a tight rein on them.

Some people think there are more of these unthinking people around than the thinking kind. I hope that isn’t true, and it really speaks to the power of education and sophistication as the best weapon we have against this sort of mindless terrorism

Fireworks Ignite After Latest Airline Terrorism Incident

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It was a surprise to see the biggest news on Christmas was that a Nigerian terrorist managed to get on a plane coming to Detroit from Amsterdam with some sort of explosive strapped to his leg.

AND – the alleged terrorist was on the NO-FLY LIST. Just think about this for a moment. A recent paper from the Naval Postgraduate School on Homeland Security estimated that the costs of the no-fly list, since 2002, range from approximately $300 million (a conservative estimate) to $966 million! And after spending over $300 million, the terrorist is able to get right on the plane, WITH EXPLOSIVES STRAPPED ON, and fly to the U.S.

Besides being a risk expert, I was mom who didn’t let her boys have toy guns. So imagine my shock at THINKING (to myself) that maybe we should let certain
Cleared passengers fly PACKING.

The passengers on the flight under discussion are the ones who subdued the perp, and I have a feeling that US airlines passengers would all be happy to take over their own security while flying the un-friendly skies.

Despite spending billions on patting down the grannies and business travelers along with 9 year old girls – someone can still board a plane and fly right into the U.S. with
explosives strapped on.

A simple risk formula applied to this entire passenger screening program shows that the entire TSA passenger screening program is too expensive for the results they are getting. The biggest cost waster is the idea that every single air traveler is treated exactly the same way. This is the elephant in TSA’s conference room. Every traveler is NOT the same. The most simplistic metrics show that:

1) Terrorists are more likely to be men.

2) Women over 60 are not likely to blow anything up.

3) Small children and federal employees are unlikely to be
Smuggling in explosive devices.

As the noted expert, Stephen Flynn, pointed in his book, America the Vulnerable, this policy creates huge cost, creates inefficiency and does not stop the dedicated terrorist.

Instead of being run as a gigantic stimulus program for the underemployed, TSA should sharpen it’s focus and began to start a true profiling program. A profiling program doesn’t have to target certain groups or type of individuals, but it should work towards automatically EXCLUDING the large groups of people who are unlikely to be a threat; let them opt for “cleared” status by completing a background check, and if these many individuals were automatically cleared, it would leave the TSA screeners more time to MORE RIGOROUS checks on potentially dangerous individuals, and ENSURE THAT PEOPLE ON THE NO-FLY LIST — DO NOT FLY!

Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but instead, the U.S. budget is being squandered on thousands of unnecessary screens, while the potential targets are not getting the indepth, and in-airport screenings they need to have.

These inane policies are not just indefensible – they are dangerous – and the latest incident just proves the point.